Source: Aljazeera

Northeast Asia is a strange place. With the exception of the hermit kingdom, North Korea, the region is home to one of the world’s most prosperous and technologically advanced nations. While Japan has been a global economic engine for decades, the likes of South Korea and Taiwan arguably represent history’s greatest economic miracles.

As for China, which is poised to become the world’s largest economy (in nominal dollars) in the coming years, its turbo-charged economic development has transformed an isolated nation into a world factory, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty within a single generation. The region is widely seen as a beacon of successful capitalism.

While Northeast Asia increasingly resembles the West in terms of wealth and technological prowess, it is also a place filled with deep-seated mutual animosity, historical grievances, territorial disputes, arms build-up and relentless jostling in almost every field of competition.

Northeast Asia is at once both Europe and the Middle East, a theatre of prosperity and conflict. In an attempt to steer the region away from confrontation, the leaders of Japan, China, and South Korea recently met for the first time in more than three years.

The historic trilateral summit saw Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, Li Keqiang, the Chinese premier, and Park Geun-hye, the South Korean president, triumphantly declaring that their long-fraught relations have been “completely restored”.

At the heart of their discussion was the necessity to find a common ground on economic cooperation and historical grievances, notwithstanding their long-standing differences on territorial issues.

Contested order

In his latest book, World Order, Henry Kissinger perspicaciously observes that Asia is filled with highly ambitious nations, with each “convinced that it is ‘rising’, it operates with the conviction that the world has yet to affirm its full deserved role.”

In a region of hyper-competitiveness, “the simultaneous pursuit of so many programmes of national prestige-building introduces a measure of volatility to the regional order”.

Kissinger’s description aptly captures the essence of inter-state relations in Northeast Asia. Almost all the three major protagonists, Japan, South Korea, and China, have been constantly searching for their place in the sun, trying to out-compete each other in every major field of innovation and development.

Throughout the Cold War period, capitalist Tokyo and Seoul stood against Communist Beijing and Pyongyang. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the gradual integration of China into the world economy, South Korea progressively gravitated towards its giant continental neighbour. While Seoul is part of the US-Japan-Korea trilateral alliance, it considers China as its major trading partner.

Back in 1991, Japan accounted for almost a quarter of South Korea’s total trade. Now, the figure stands at only 8 percent. In contrast, the same period saw China’s share of South Korea’s total trade jumping from 4 percent to a whopping 21 percent. South Korea is gradually being integrated into a Sino-centric economic order in Asia.

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